A compassionate, Christian reflection on the death of Hugh Hefner

The headlines of the secular media announcing Hugh Hefner’s death
are hailing him as a pioneer of free speech and sexual liberation. What should
Christians think of the passing of one of the pioneers of the pornographic
revolution?

As a teacher and promoter of St. John Paul II’s Theology of the
Body, I have written and commented frequently on Hefner’s life. Why? Because to
understand the mind of Hefner is, in a way, to understand the mind of our
culture. Hefner was one of the most successful “evangelists” of the modern era.
His “gospel” has gone out across the globe and has had an enormous impact on
the way we think about ourselves and the world. And those who call themselves
Christians have been far from immune from this false gospel. I would venture to
say that if the average believer in the western world spilled the contents of
his or her mind on a table, thoughts and ideas about the body and sex would
look a lot more like the vision Hefner promoted then, say, the “great mystery”
of sexual love unfolded by John Paul II.

I’ve studied Hefner’s life because I’ve wanted to understand how
today’s sexual chaos began, and he is a key figure in all of it. What I learned
about him was illuminating. It should cause us pause that the founder of Playboy magazine
was raised in a Christian home — a Christian home, however, that was steeped in
a fearful, puritanical approach to the body and sexuality.

“Religion was a very important part of my upbringing,” Hefner said
in a 2006 interview. “I saw in it a quality, in terms of (some) ideals and
morality, that I embraced. I also saw part of it, the part related to human
sexuality and other things, as hypocritical and hurtful. And I think that is
the origin of who I am. The heart of who I am is a result of trying to make
some sense of all of that.”

The “sense” he made, of course, was to go from one extreme to the
other, launching a pornographic empire that — for all its promises of freedom,
pleasure and happiness — has wrought destruction on human relationships around
the globe. Hefner made a career out of objectifying women and shamelessly
encouraging men the world over to follow his lead. It is right to disdain this
as a horror. However, we must be careful that our judgment and disdain for the
sin does not become — subtly or not so subtly — judgment and disdain for the
sinner. As I once heard it said, behind the eyes of everyone is a story that,
if we knew it, would make us weep. Learning more of Hefner’s story certainly
had that effect on me.

The silence, fear and repressive approach to the body and
sexuality that Hefner grew up with is tragically common in Christian homes,
even today. As Pope Benedict XVI forthrightly confessed in a 2010 interview,
“negative appraisals of sexuality ... found (their) way into the Church” and
they have “warped and intimidated people.”

Hefner’s is an extreme case of how people can react when they are
warped and intimidated in this way. From his own account, Playboy magazine
was Hefner’s “personal response to the hurt and hypocrisy” of his puritanical
upbringing. He elaborates:

Our family was ... Puritan(ical) in a very real sense ... Never
hugged. Oh, no. There was absolutely no hugging or kissing in my family. There
was a point in time when my mother, later in life, apologized to me for not
being able to show affection. That was, of course, the way I’d been raised. I
said to her, “Mom, ... because of the
things you weren’t able to do, it set me on a course that changed my life and
the world.” When I talk about the hurt and hypocrisy in some of our values —
our sexual values — it comes from the fact that I didn’t get hugged a lot as a
kid.

Is this not a window into the painful story behind his eyes? Of
course, Hefner cannot simply explain away his behavior as the result of “not
being hugged,” nor abdicate responsibility for his choices by playing the
victim. Still, behind so many of our bad choices — especially in the realm of
sexuality and erotic desire — is a God-given yearning for love that hasn’t been
met in healthy holy ways. So we seek to satisfy it in other ways.

“It’s the key to my life,” said Hefner in a 2010 interview, “the
need to feel loved … I think I’ve been searching to fill that hole that was
left there in early childhood.” Regarding his promiscuous lifestyle, he even
admitted, “I think that what I’m probably doing is avoiding being hurt again.
Safety in numbers.” Still he lamented that, despite countless lovers, he had
“never known a fulfillment of love.”

It’s impossible, of course, to know a true fulfillment of love
apart from the divine plan for love, apart from the God who is love. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts
it, “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created
by God and for God … Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never
stops searching for” (CCC 27). Like so many other people raised in Christian
homes, what Hugh Hefner never learned is that — surprisingly to many — the church
calls that desire for God eros.

Eros is not a base desire for selfish pleasure — that’s the
twisted version of erotic longing we experience in our fallen nature. Eros, as
God made it to be, is a yearning for everything true, good and beautiful, for
the infinite fulfillment of love called heaven. “In this regard,” wrote Pope
Benedict XVI, “we must not forget that the dynamism of desire is always open to
redemption.” This means indulgence (Hefner’s approach) and repression (the
puritanical approach) are not the only two options. Rather, as Benedict XVI
continued, we “need to set out on the path of purification and healing of
desire. We are pilgrims, heading for the heavenly homeland.” The pilgrimage
of eros “is
not, then, about suffocating the longing that dwells in the heart of man, but
about freeing it, so that it can reach its true height.”

At his deepest level, whether he knew it or not, Hefner, like
every human being, yearned for this true height, for divine love, for the
redemptive love revealed and offered in Christ. Hefner himself stated in a 2009
interview that he’d “like to find out what (Jesus Christ) was all about … I was
raised in a good Methodist home, and I had questions about organized religion,
and I would love to have the answers.”

Let us pray he has found those answers now. Let us pray he has
found the infinite ocean of God’s mercy, which is more than enough to swallow
his sins. Let us pray he has encountered the love he was always looking for.

West
is a lecturer, author founder and president of The Cor Project,
a global membership and outreach organization devoted to
Theology of the Body.